SMOKE
Exhaust behind the cursor
Emitted by distance travelled, so the trail looks the same at 60 and 120 Hz. Slow deliberate movement stays completely clean.
Pointer Break
A skatepark that lives above your windows. Exhaust smoke behind your cursor, and a skateboard that launches off ramps, grinds rails, and stays wherever it lands until you go and collect it.
Coming to the Mac App Store MACOS 14+ · NO PERMISSIONS
PLACEHOLDERS · REAL CAPTURES AND THE GAMEPLAY CLIP GO IN BEFORE LAUNCH
RAMPS
Quarter-pipes you launch off
Cross the lip with enough speed and roughly the right heading and the board leaves on its own, exit direction taken from the lip tangent.
RAILS
Grinds, catchable out of the air
Which is what makes ramp → air → grind → pop chain on its own. A landing from a wide angle grinds slowly rather than at full pace.
HALFPIPES
Pump, stall, air out
Parametrised by arc length with gravity resolved onto the local tangent, so all three are one equation. A line runs for a few airs, then settles.
SWING AIRS
No furniture needed
Reverse the cursor at the top of a swing and the board pops off and tricks. The halfpipe is wherever you happen to be drawing it.
Nothing here is a plugin.
macOS has no general “load my code into the frontmost app” mechanism any more, and it isn’t needed: the global behaviour is a property of the window. Clicks pass straight through to whatever is underneath, and the process is never the active application.
Everything is CPU-simulated and GPU-drawn as instanced Metal draws, one pass per display, from a single buffer. If you’re typing, you’re not moving the mouse — once the board has come to rest the display link is invalidated and a 10 Hz poll takes over. That’s deliberately a poll rather than a global event monitor: it keeps the app free of any permission prompt.
- LSUIElement + .accessory
- The process is never the active application, so there is nothing to switch away from.
- ignoresMouseEvents = true
- Borderless, clear background: clicks pass straight through to whatever is underneath.
- .screenSaver level
- Above the menu bar and over other apps’ full-screen windows.
- .canJoinAllSpaces + .stationary
- Follows you between Spaces instead of living on one.
- one window per display
- Each screen draws the same scene offset by its own origin, from one shared instance buffer.
It costs nothing when you’re not moving the mouse.
- SYSTEM
- macOS 14 or later
- PERMISSIONS
- none of any kind
- INJECTION INTO OTHER APPS
- none
- IDLE COST
- 10 Hz poll, display link parked
- PRICE
- free; £4.99 one-time full unlock
- START AT LOGIN
- optional, in the menu
The download is free and stays free: the board, the smoke, the tricks and the default layout, with no time limit. One payment of £4.99 unlocks the layout editor, the extra furniture and the score — once, not a subscription.
This page gets the real listing link the day it ships. Quit from the menu bar
item, or pkill -x PointerBreak.
Known rough edges
Space between displays
The walls are the edges of your displays, so a board bounces off the gaps between them rather than resting somewhere nothing draws. Two displays that meet only at a corner are not joined.
The real cursor always draws on top
The WindowServer composites it above every window, so the board sits under the arrow. Hiding the system cursor would pull in the Accessibility permission.
Some places nothing draws
The login window, Fast User Switching and secure input fields. Expected, and not fixable.
Start at Login needs approval
A mixed tick in the menu means macOS is waiting on you; clicking it opens System Settings.